The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five Read Online Free PDF Page A

the next two decades sharing that realization with sentient beings.
    As Richard also points out in his letter, after discovering and translating The Sadhana of Mahamudra, Trungpa Rinpoche was delighted to share this practice with anyone who might be interested. When he returned to England, his students there took up the practice of the sadhana immediately. In an unpublished memoir, Rinpoche’s wife, Diana Mukpo, describes the practice of the sadhana at Samye Ling, Rinpoche’s meditation center in Scotland: “When I was visiting Samye Ling with my mother in 1969, Rinpoche had only recently returned from this trip to Bhutan. Now, in addition to traditional Tibetan practices, students at Samye Ling chanted an English translation of The Sadhana of Mahamudra, crudely printed on coloured paper.”
    Once he arrived in America in 1970, in spite of his insistence on the sitting practice of meditation as the main discipline, Trungpa Rinpoche encouraged students to gather together and read the sadhana on the new and full moon. This practice continues to the present day. During Trungpa Rinpoche’s lifetime, he conferred the formal empowerment, or abhisheka, for this sadhana twice that we know of: in India in 1968 and slightly later in England. In 1982, His Holiness Khyentse Rinpoche requested that Trungpa Rinpoche write down the abhisheka text, which he had spontaneously composed when he gave the transmissions years before. He did not accomplish this before he died, but Khyentse Rinpoche, who had a very close connection to Trungpa Rinpoche and to his students, completed both the abhisheka and the feast liturgy in 1990. Rinpoche’s eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who inherited the leadership of the Shambhala Buddhist community in 1990, has conferred this abhisheka in a number of ceremonies, beginning in 1993. Several thousand students, both senior students and recent meditators, have taken part in these events. Carried out of a lonely retreat in a cave in Bhutan, the lineage of transmission has traveled far and grown quite large in less than three decades.
    In The Sadhana of Mahamudra, the seed syllable HUM plays a major role in invoking the power of sanity to overcome the forces of materialism in the world. The next offering in Volume Five is “H UM: An Approach to Mantra,” a short article on the mantra HUM which was originally published in 1972 in Garuda II: Working with Negativity. As he so often does, Chögyam Trungpa begins his discussion by dispelling preconceptions. That is, he first tells the reader what mantra practice is not. It is not, he informs us, “a magical spell used in order to gain psychic powers for selfish purposes, such as accumulation of wealth, power over others, and destruction of enemies.” He explains that the genuine usage of mantra arises from an understanding of the teachings of the Buddha on the four marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, emptiness, and egolessness. Mantra is the invocation of egoless or nontheistic energies of wisdom and insight. He also distinguishes the Buddhist understanding of mantra from its usage in Hindu tantra, explaining that the divinities invoked in Buddhist tantra are not external but rather represent “aspects of the awakened state of mind.” Trungpa Rinpoche then describes a number of ways in which the mantra HUM has been used. It was employed by Guru Padmasambhava “to subdue the force of the negative environment created by minds poisoned with passion, aggression, and ignorance.” For beginning meditators, he suggests that chanting the sacred music of HUM can quiet the mind and ease the force of irritating thoughts. For advanced meditators, he states that the syllable HUM is a means of developing the wisdom of the five buddha families, innate wisdoms arising from emptiness, which one finds within oneself, not somewhere in the external world. He also describes HUM as the “sonorous sound of silence” and as “that state of meditation when awareness